


through the muted waves

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Category: The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25344880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: Scientists call the Tomorrow People the next stage of human evolution, the government denies their existence, but their cocktail of psionic abilities have made homo superiors the target of Eligius. Even though Eligius has closed the project that allows Tomorrow People to override their genetic inability to kill, they still relentlessly hunt them, desperate to neutralize their abilities. When Murpy wakes up in Eligius headquarters, he knows he’s returned for a reason...if only he could understand his connection to the brown-eyed girl who keeps cropping up on the corners of his memory.//2nd place tie for best use of Kiss to Keep Cover trope; 3rd place tie for best use of Scifi Theme
Relationships: Emori/John Murphy (The 100)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8
Collections: Chopped 3.0 Round 2





	through the muted waves

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all! So excited to write for this round of chopped! For this round, the theme is scifi, and the first trope if based off a TV show or movie--I chose The Tomorrow People! I kept the same universe, some premises, and switched out the characters; some more on that in the end note!
> 
> The rest of the tropes are spoilers, and in the end note :) 

Cowboy boots echo on the concrete floors of the hallway leading to the laboratory. The doors swish open on their sensors; the machine in the middle of the room is nothing remarkable—the size of a refrigerator, a mess of knobs and monitors and statistics, whirring and beeping on occasion—the techs back away from it as a man strides in. 

“Talk to me,” he says.

“Yes, boss,” a scientist mumbles, “uh, sir. First human test this morning.”

“Successful?”

“The electromagnetic surge from The Suppressor will slow the life cycle of all non-saps in the tristate area, so the prime barrier is easily transgressed—”

“Is it successful, I asked.”

The scientist bites his lip. “Yes sir. I-if it’s running, all the Tomorrow People can kill.”

The room is quiet. 

A small smile appears on the man’s face.

“Good work, doc,” he says, and the doors swish open as he walks towards them. “I want it running non stop. Start the radiator, get a couple vials of Diyoza’s serum, and bring me the boy who survived the Annex Program.” 

— 

Murphy winces before his eyes are even open, the overhead lights too strong behind his eyelids.

It’s quiet, except for the humming. 

So he knows, before he feels the table underneath his shoulders, or twitches his toes to confirm that he’s not wearing socks or shoes, that he’s back at Eligius. Everywhere else in the world, he can hear everything, but here it’s just the thoughts rattling around in his head. 

He’d forgotten how much he hates that particular sensation.

Murphy lifts his shoulders a bit, and feels a familiar prick at the base of his skull. 

So they drugged him too. 

Nice.

It’s not surprising, he didn’t really leave on the best of terms, but he wonders what new concoction Diyoza contrived to shoot through his veins. 

He opens his eyes. 

It’s not the room he had when he was an agent, back when McCreary had first recruited him, and it’s not the holding cell they’d kept him in when he was captured the first and second time after that, before he’d been broken out by—

Murphy blinks. 

Well.

The memory loss is new. 

Maybe it’s a side effect of the radiator, the sound he recognized before he was conscious, at the center of the complex, to stop people like him. 

Well, his mind at least. 

Eligius doesn’t care about him anymore than he cares about them (none), but they do have a couple of fucks to give for telepathy and teleportation, and a whole bushel of them for telekinesis. The humming is more than white noise, it’s a frequency stopping his mind from getting him the hell out of here.

Maybe it’s a little clumsy today, and managed to take out some memories on its way.

Murphy sits up. 

His head doesn’t spin, which is a good sign, but then he hears cowboy boots in the hallways and that’s the opposite. 

“Pax,” he says, as the door opens, and Paxton McCreary fills the doorframe. 

“Jonathan,” McCreary drawls, which is fair, but also kinda lazy, because it’s not even his name.

Murphy shuffles on the table, rolling his neck. “Is the memory thing a side effect or what?”

“Oh, so it worked,” Paxton smiles. “That’s good.”

“And if it hadn’t?” Murphy asks. 

McCreary waves a hand, like that’s inconsequential. He crosses into the room, looks at some charts at the head of the bed on principal. “So, Murphy. How’s it feel to be back?”

Murphy thinks about how something, he has no idea what, is mixing in his blood. How his memory is spotty on some things, but crystal clear on others. How the radiator is stopping his mind from working, how the only thing he can hear is his own thoughts. How he knows he can’t run, can’t fight, and the only thing he can do is what Eligius tells him to do.

Murphy laughs a little, because that always scores well with McCreary. “Like I never left.”

— 

They let him out after two weeks, like a dog on a leash.

Actually, like a dog on a shock collar. 

On the plus side, he now knows what Diyoza’s serum is: a kill switch. It’s a little more sophisticated than that, a latent virus that can be activated remotely, that will cause his organs to start eating themselves, happy stuff. 

Eligius loves a good insurance policy. 

Soon there’ll be missions, when they’re done running whatever tests they don’t think he knows they’re running on him. But for now, it’s just good to see the sky.

Another week and he’s pulled into a briefing room, so he knows the tests found what they were looking for.

At least he’s not killing for them.

They’ll get there, eventually, Eligius always does. That was the whole point of Annex, to take someone who couldn’t kill and override their DNA. It was a fun amount of splicing that had to happen, a ridiculous amount of blood samples and experiments, but they’d figured it out. 

As far as he knows, he’s the only one it worked for. 

They shut down the program when he left...now why the hell does he know that, but not who he ran with for the years after that?

It’s weird, because it’s not like amnesia.

It’s like someone opened his mind up and put shadows in the places of people he used to know. 

Which is pretty on brand for Eligius, but it’s still a weird feeling. 

Regardless, they don’t have him killing.

They let him out on his leash, give him some coordinates, and he does what they ask. Sometimes it’s listening (reading a diplomat’s mind), sometimes it’s couriering (teleporting someone, with or without their consent), sometimes it’s just observation. McCreary always likes to send Tomorrow People into tense situations so if they fail, they can just blink out of there. 

When he was younger, he really thought the observation missions were just curiosities. 

Now he knows they’re looking for people that are breaking out, glitching into their genetic superiority, and not aware of it yet.

He tries to be deliberately blind now. 

Not that Eligius won’t find out eventually, but if Murphy can buy some sucker a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, of normal life before cowboy boots and kill switch viruses are the norm, then he’s going to do it. 

If nothing else, it’s good to screw Paxton over. 

He falls into a rhythm easily enough, the coming and going, the debrief and the dosing, and the normalcy of being McCreary’s dog. 

But then, he sees her.

Not actually her, but her reflection in a window display on 5th: brown hair and brown eyes, an absolutely fantastic face tattoo, staring out at him behind a sequined blazer on display at Bergdorf Goodman. He sees lots of people, hears all of them, but something about her…

She’s not there when he turns around. 

The space where she should’ve been is empty, then trampled by a group of tourists hauling selfie sticks (come on, guys, it’s 2020) and Bloomingdale’s bags. 

A part of his mind tries to convince him that she’s one of them, that she just teleported away, but he knows that’s wishful thinking; if she were a Tomorrow Person, he would’ve heard her. People don’t just blip in and out, there’s so many wavelengths that Tomorrow People put out and he would’ve heard at least _some_ of them.

The way she was standing in the window though, it was like a memory. He knows her. Somewhere, somehow, she stood in front of him, looked at him, knew him, and stayed.

Well, shit. 

She’s one of the shadows Diyoza wiped, and, judging by the way Murphy’s heart is pounding like a street drum, she’s a hell of a lot more than that.

—

Back at Eligius, Murphy recounts what the techs want to hear, rattling off the information he gathered as they take vitals, making sure he’s not lying.

As soon as they unstrap him, he’s stalking up to McCreary’s office; the thugs in front of the door let him through, which is decent of them. 

“Are you going to tell me who Diyoza picked out of my head?”  
“Murphy,” McCreart says dryly, around a toothpick. “Come on in.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Murphy says, ignoring the chairs in front of his desk. “So?”

“We had a deal.”

If they weren’t inside Eligius, Murphy could take that toothpick, shove it back through McCreary’s throat and make cottage cheese out of his mind. 

But they’re inside Eligius, so he takes a toothpick from the dispenser on McCreary’s desk, passes it across the backs of his fingers like a pencil. 

“What kind of a deal?” he asks.

“A trade,” McCreary shrugs. “Turns out, you’re pretty awful at being a sap.”

The silence in Murphy’s head seems a little louder. 

They’d taken it away?

The telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, the things that make him _homo superior_ as opposed to _homo sapien_...just gone? 

He’d be like this—echoing, empty—all the time?

McCreary chuckles at his silence. “Yeah, we agreed on that at least: being non-sap is what makes you worthwhile.”

“Eligius doesn’t have much need for another sap, do they, Pax?”

The man’s eyes narrow. “Careful, boy, you’re just as mortal as I am here.”

Murphy wants to roll his eyes, but he doesn’t look away. Psionic abilities have nothing to do with lifespan, they both know that. McCreary just means that in these walls, he’s just as unspecial as anyone else. 

“So we traded?” Murphy asks. “You took a couple people, I got the three Ts back.”

McCreary tilts his head. “More or less. Feels right, having you back as an agent, doesn’t it?”

So, that was the cost of his abilities.

Whoever he’d run with, the girl he saw in the window, in exchange for the things that made him a half-decent use of oxygen.

The indentured service to Eligius was pretty much implicit.

“How long am I staying?” Murphy asks, not expecting an answer.

McCreary plucks the toothpick out, looking at it. 

“You can leave whenever you want, Murphy. Up to Diyoza to decide when she wants that switch flipped. I’d hate to see that; we’ve got plenty of uses for you here. But even then, dying as a non-sap...that’s just a gift from us to you.”

He flicks the toothpick at a wastebasket across the room; it pings when it hits the metal, then lands silently in the rest of the trash.

— 

There’s someone on the Upper West side. 

They send Murphy to a couple coordinates around the neighborhood; set him up at a bodega, or on a bench at Central Park, at a cafe across the street from a fancy apartment building.

They’ve been picking up readings inside The Dakota, and Murphy hopes that whoever it is, they’re good at playing dumb in public.

He keeps on seeing her, the girl with the tattoo.

In a crowded street, on a bulletin board, in the subway. 

And then in his sleep.

—

He hears her crying, her soft voice choking on tears, and feels a pleading hand on his arms. “Don’t do this, you’re better than this—”

“I have to,” he says, wishing her could see through the dark fog around them. She’s there, so close, but he can’t make her out.

“You don’t!” she begs. “John, you don’t have to, there’s nothing wrong with—”

“Not for you!” he shouts, and she lets go of his arm. 

She’s silent.

Immediately he regrets it, reaches out for her, his hands streaming through the wispy, empty, air. 

He can’t find her.

“I-I didn’t mean it,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll stay.”

The fog is thick and it’s turned cold.

“Hello?” he calls into the mist, desperate, “Come back, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

The mist becomes angry, pressing tighter to him, overwhelming him.

“You...you don’t understand,” he whispers. “I need this, I need—”

“And I needed you, John,” she says, her voice all around him, pouring over him, in the thick fog that’s choking him. “I needed you, just you, without everything you think you need to be whole.”

There’s a clap of something like thunder and the fog dissipates; he’s in the middle of a highway, alone, and he feels something down the back of his spine. He knows he’s complete again, but she’s gone.

A horn sounds.

Murphy turns and there’s an 18-wheeler barrelling towards him; he doesn’t move, waits for it, and when he opens his eyes he’s back in his bunk Eligius, wishing Diyoza’s drugs were stronger. 

—

They send him to the abandoned City Hall subway station, which is probably pretty trippy for anyone on the 6 train, who’s looking for a glimpse of the old stop as their train whizzes by. McCreary didn’t tell him where to go once he’s there, just gave him the coordinates, and now here he is, poking around a decaying transit center under the Financial District.

There’s a pricking at the back of his skull.

Which means Diyoza graduated from just erasing people, to writing subway stations out of his memory.

Which means whatever’s here is pretty damn important, for them to send her in to root it out.

He doesn’t have an objective, this time, McCreary just said to go and tell him what he finds.

The station is quiet though, water dripping down old tiles, whirring of subway cars racing hundreds of yards above and beside. Higher above, the whole city, but here, it’s still.

Someone teleports behind him.

He feels them before he hears them, and when he turns, there’s two people behind him. They don’t look related, and they don’t look familiar, but they look at him like they’re suspicious. 

He can’t hear their thoughts.

The guy is thinking of that song from Top Gun, thinking it loud enough to block Murphy from hearing anything else. The girl is reciting pi, and he stops tracking her after a good dozen digits. He should’ve guessed they’d be good, from how clean the teleportation was, but it’s been a while since he’s stood in front of people like him.

“Is it true?” she asks.

She’s in front of the guy, her dark hair in a tight pony tail and a brace on her left knee. Murphy’s skull tingles, but no dice. 

“Is what true?” Murphy responds. 

“That you’re McCreary’s assassin now,” the guy says. The south London accent is a nice touch, but no friendlier to Murphy’s memory.

Murphy could lie, and he thinks they all know it, but he doesn’t like his odds in a fight, so he’s not really inclined to provoke them.

“Astonishingly enough,” he says, holding up his hands defensively, “they haven’t had me kill yet.”

“Yet?” the woman asks. She looks at the man next to her, and he crosses his arms. 

“Got any plans you want to let us in on?” he asks.

Murphy shrugs. “Nah, I don’t even know what I’m having for dinner.”

They stare at each other, the three of them. 

“Oh,” she says after a moment, blinking.

The man looks at her, and she presses a hand over her forehead, runs it down her ponytail, then it drops to her side.

“He doesn’t know who we are,” she says, quiet.

Murphy points at her. “Guilty.”

The guy looks at him. “How is that possible?”

“I’m the lab rat, not the scientist. I know I should know you, but not who you are…” 

The man’s eyes narrow. “What, they just let you loose and you happened to wind up back at—”

“Wait, Zeke,” she interrupts him, waiting for him to stop. “He’s been inside.”

Murphy assumes that inside means ‘of Eligius’, in which case she’s right, he has, but he doesn’t know anything that’ll help them.

“I have seen the inside of a testing room, and the hallways between my bunk and McCreary’s office. Nothing exciting, sorry.” 

“Yeah, you sound real contrite,” the guy mutters.

“You don’t know anything about a machine called The Suppressor?”

Murphy shakes his head. “Coming up empty. What is it?”

The girl purses her lips. “We don’t know either. We were tracking shipments in and out of Eligius and guessed they were building something, but weren’t sure.”

“How were you tracking—”

“You really think we’re going to tell you that,” Zeke interrupts. “So you can go back and tell McCreary?”

Truthfully, Murphy had forgotten for a moment that he wasn’t on their side.

“Fair enough,” he says. “Okay, so you think they’re building A Big Bad.”

The woman is quiet for a moment. “Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So they want to know how much we know,” Zeke finishes her thought.

Murphy frowns. “You think that they think that you think there’s something inside Eligius, so they sent me to find out just how much you know?”

The girl sighs, like she’s tired. “That’s exactly what I think.”

He wishes he could help her, tell them, but he really doesn’t know anything. “Looks like I’ve got nothing to tell you about them, or them about you.”

Her mouth tightens.

“Then I guess we’re done here,” she says, and a moment later, she’s gone.

The guy hesitates, the station seeming empty. 

“She misses you,” he says, looking at the space where the woman had just been. “Take care of yourself, Murphy.”

It’s weird to be spoken to by someone unfamiliar, who knows him. Murphy doesn’t get to dwell on it, because a moment later, he’s alone at the City Hall Station, knowing he has two faces for the shadows, but nothing more than that.

—

They’re on a boat this time, sinking fast, in the Atlantic. 

“Don’t leave, John, you don’t have to.”

He doesn’t look for her in the murky waters, knows he won’t see her.

“I have to,” he says, the water rising. It’s frothing and it’s freezing but the door won’t budge to let them out of the rapidly-filling boat.

“Just let it go, John, please. You can do it, you can just—”

“I can’t,” he tells her, and the water reaches his chin. “You wouldn’t love me if I wasn’t me.”

“You’ll still be you,” she insists. “You…John...”

The dark water rises, and through the muted waves, Murphy hears cowboy boots pacing, then a cold laugh. 

—

The _homo superior_ at The Dakota is a 12-year-old girl named Charlotte.

She trips, crossing the street, just a little, and doesn’t fall; a moment later, she’s upright, six inches forward. Her hands are braced, to catch her fall, and her eyes widen slightly when she realizes she’s vertical. 

Murphy sees it from the cafe, over the edge of the sudoku book Eligius gave him as cover, recognizes the motion. 

She’s teleported, and she has no idea. 

The official mission at Eligius is that they’ll help Tomorrow People grow into their full power, accept their skillset, or help them readjust to the normal world. What that really means is that they’ll recruit them into agents, and strip them of their psionic abilities if they don’t prove effective. Twelve might not be young by Eligius standards, but Murphy hasn’t brought in anyone that age. 

His options are pretty limited.

It’s only a matter of time before another agent notices, and if they do, McCreary won’t think twice of any repercussions. 

He flips a couple of pages back in the sudoku book and finds one that works for him. He writes quickly on the page—Charlotte Kimball, 12 y/o, Apt 8—knowing it’s not much, but hoping it’s enough. 

He tears the page out, folds it, and looks up at the security camera in the corner of the cafe.

3/14, he writes on the top of the paper. He tucks it into the menu stand at the end of the table, breaks eye contact with the camera, and then he waits. 

Presently, a woman leaves the apartment building; she’s in a bright coat and sunglasses, immaculate, and smiles at the doorman. 

She’s a prostitute.

High end, for sure, someone who’s paid for discretion and to look like she blends in. She’s harmless, Murphy knows, but Eligius will totally buy her as a target.

“I’m gonna follow something,” he says into his bluetooth. It’s supposed to look like a normal airpod, but it’s a one way transmission, for Eligius to hear what he’s doing or seeing, not for them to communicate back to him. He’s just reporting where he’s going so Diyoza doesn’t get trigger happy. 

As he slips out of the cafe, he feels another agent fall into step behind him.

“Real subtle, Pax,” he says into the bluetooth.

The woman walks quickly, confident for a couple of blocks, but he can hear the moment she starts double checking. He can hear when her pulse spikes, just a bit, and she looks hesitates slightly. 

**_Is he following me?_ **

She slows her step, pausing to look at her reflection in a shop window.

**_Okay, fix your hair so it looks like you’re just checking yourself out...oh my god he’s totally looking._ **

She keeps going, and at the next cross street, she drops her sunglasses.

She’s pretty good, Murphy thinks. 

He’s close enough behind her that he steps directly around her, keeping ahead, but her pulse doesn’t steady. 

**_He slowed down._ **

Murphy frowns; no he didn’t.

Understanding dawns. 

“I told you, McCreary,” he mutters into the bluetooth. 

He turns back around and the woman has stood up, and stepped right in front of the other agent. 

**_Oh yeah, you’re not getting away with this._ **

“Why are you following me, huh?” she asks, jabbing a finger in the man’s chest.

“Uh, ma’am, I’m not—” the agent stammers, and Murphy jogs back.

**_Bullshit, I saw you at the Dakota._ **

“You totally are,” she says. “Since I left the apartment, right, and you slowed down when I looked in the mirror and just now you wouldn’t pass me.”

“I wasn’t—-”

“Just leave her alone, man,” Murphy cuts in. 

**_Dude, I don’t need your help here._ **

The woman looks at him, the agent glares at him and Murphy smiles inanely. 

**_Bet you just love the chance to swoop in and save the day, don’t you?_ **

“Thank you,” she says.

“Yeah, no worries,” he says. “Come on, my guy, move along.”

He grabs the agent’s arm, and the guy lets him direct him away from the woman for all of two yards, before he jerks his arm away. 

“False alarm,” Murphy says into the bluetooth.

They walk back towards the Dakota, and this time Murphy sits at a bench by the park, hoping that was enough time.

—

Three days later, he’s in McCreary’s office. 

The man has another toothpick, cleaning his nails with it this time. He gestures for Murphy to sit, and Murphy does not. 

McCreary shrugs, turning around one of his monitors. It’s security cam footage, and it’s from the cafe across the Dakota. Murphy watches himself flip back a page or two in the book, and when he starts to write, the footage cuts out. The screen goes pixelated, and the sound of static echo around McCreary’s office.

“It keeps up like that for seven minutes and forty-three seconds,” McCreary says calmly.

There’s two options here.

One—the most likely option—someone else found out about Charlotte, and they know Murphy knew, so someone from Eligius went back and erased this footage and is hoping his tell-tale heart gives him away.

Two—and it really is a gamble—the couple from the subway station and whoever else they work with were monitoring him, saw his message, teleported in and out of the cafe to get the paper.

“That’s unfortunate,” Murphy says, keeping his voice neutral. 

“What’s unfortunate,” McCreary says, “is that little Charlotte, one of the residents of the Dakota, is missing.”

Again, two options. 

One—she’s somewhere inside of Eligius, waiting to begin training, and ‘safe’ as can be, and McCreary wants Murphy to admit that he knew about her.

Two—the tomorrow people beat Eligius to her.

Murphy shakes his head. “That’s too bad. Never understood why people have kids in the city.”

McCreary’s eyes narrow. “I’m going to be blunt, Murphy: we have no idea where she is. Who did you tell?”

It could still be a gambit.

If Murphy knows anything about Eligius is that they believe in nothing so firmly as false security. If he admits to anything, he’s as good as guilty for everything.

He looks McCreary straight in the eye.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

McCreary holds his gaze, then looks down to his desk.

“I didn’t want to have to do this, John,” he says quietly. He reaches over to his phone and presses a button. “Show her in, please.”

Murphy hears the doors open and the shuffling as an agent pulls someone in; he assumes Charlotte.

“John?”

The voice from his dreams.

She’s behind him, the girl with the tattoo, he knows without looking and he knows if he looks he’ll actually see her—but.

But McCreary is watching him.

And McCreary brought her for a reason.

If he knows that Murphy recognizes this woman, whoever she is and whatever tie she has to his past, McCreary will know there’s more that he’s hiding.

So Murphy doesn’t move.

Raises an eyebrow at McCreary, calm, and tilts his head toward the door. “Who’s this?”

She stops moving.

It’s just like in his nightmares, the moment when she realizes something’s different, he’s gone, only this time she’s real, just over his shoulder, but he can’t look at her or McCreary will know.

“This is Emori Lee.”

Emori. 

Her name washes over him, a name that escaped him every time he closed his eyes. He doesn’t know how they met, doesn’t know who she is, but he knows he knows her.

McCreary can’t know that. 

“Who?” he asks.

McCreary inclines his head, Murphy looks, and there she is.

She looks normal, divine, the way he’s envisioned her. Dark hair, dark eyes, fixed on him in an expression of hope.

He hates that he has to break that.

“Surely,” McCreary says, voice silken. “You remember Emori?”

He doesn’t.

He knows he knew her, he knows she knew him, but he doesn’t know what she knows about Charlotte, or him, or McCreary, and the best thing he can do is to get her out of here.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and hopes she knows he means it, “I don’t.”

Her eyes close.

She looks down, then back at him, then McCreary.

“Can I?” she asks.

McCreary nods, and the agent lets go of her arm. 

She steps forward, slowly, until she’s in front of him. She brings her right hand up to his face, and Murphy clenches his jaw.

Every bone in his body wants to lean into her. 

Instead, Murphy steadies himself and waits for her hand to come to him, instead of rushing to her. Her fingers brush the side of his face, and her hand is light on his jaw, turning his face towards her.

She holds his eyes for a moment, and Murphy wants to glaze over.

He needs to turn off. Needs to shut down, not stare at her and pretend to not know her instead of crumpling in front of her, his knees hitting the ground as he apologizes for all the things he’s said in a thousand nightmares, and once before.

But that’s not important.

What’s important is that she walks out the door the same way she came in, in no way implicated by him, beyond past association. 

He hopes he can tell her as much.

Whoever they were before, maybe it’s strong enough that she can read it in him now.

She’s sapien, after all, she’s never relied on telepathy to know his thoughts.

He focuses on the line the tattoo makes down the center of her nose.

It’s tempting to follow the curve of it, trace the pattern over her forehead, down her cheekbones, almost to her jaw, curling around her nose and lips, but that would look like a caress, and he can’t risk it. 

So he stares, and trusts her to read him.

Her hand moves slightly on his cheek. 

“You really don’t know me?” she asks, voice small.

I do, he wants to shout. I do, I know who you are but I just...I can’t. And it’s not like last time, when I could choose you and didn’t, now I can’t, but it’s for you, I promise, I promise... 

“Wish I did,” he says. 

She flinches. 

Her hand drops and she looks at McCreary. “Can I go, please?”

Paxton nods, at Emori then at the agent, and Murphy feels the smallest trill of satisfaction. 

He doesn’t remember her, she looks devastated, but at least he didn’t break. 

Emori turns to go, then pauses. She turns quickly, almost on impulse, reaches back for Murphy, and she kisses him. 

It’s over before he can register that it happened—her hand at the back of his neck, her other hand resting just for a moment on his stomach above his waistband, the way her breath catches when she pulls back and then she’s gone.

She’s gone.

Like every dream and every nightmare, she’s gone.

The agent takes her away.

Murphy runs a hand through his hair and turns back to the desk.

“You going to tell me who that was?” he says.

McCreary makes an annoyed sound and waves a hand; Murphy’s dismissed. 

He waits until the agents have left him alone, and then he checks, as subtly as he can—he was right. Something in her kiss, in her eyes, just before it…

He pulls out a tiny scrap of paper, rolled, from the waistband of his jeans. 

3.14 it says.

It’s pi, the same digits the girl in the subway station has recited, the ones he’d written on the sudoku page. 

Charlotte’s safe. 

—

He’s on borrowed time.

Sure, the Emori thing convinced McCreary that he’s not hiding anything, but the man’s already questioning his efficacy. The whole point of keeping Murphy around is to find homo superiors before the Tomorrow People do, and if he can’t help with that, then he’s a suck on their resources.

So, borrowed time. 

He starts eavesdropping a little more, using the missions when he’s free of the psionic-cancelling machine to listen in on the Eligius coms. The bluetooth they gave him still isn’t two-way, but if he tries, he can hear what they’re saying to his babysitter agent. Finally, he overhears something on The Suppressor.

Not much, just a reference to sub-level C.

He thinks about it a lot now, whenever he can, trying to figure out how to get out. There’s agents to get past, and digital locks, biometric scanners somewhere along the way, and then cameras everywhere along the way. 

This would be easier if he had a crew.

He tries not to think about Emori—if she’s safe, if she’s with the Tomorrow People, if McCreary’s gone back for her—or the couple from the City Hall station. 

It takes him two months of pushing boundaries, eavesdropping when he’s on the leash, careful observance of schedules and cameras and range, and he realizes he can do it. 

Sneak in camera blindspots, past the guards that know he shouldn’t be there, to agents who don’t know better, to sub-level C. He doesn’t know what’s waiting for him there, but he knows the machine is something worth protecting, something worth spying on.

If he’s on borrowed time anyways, he might as well go down with it. 

Fifteen minutes later, he’s lying on the floor, his vision blurring, wondering how long it’ll take to bleed out. 

—

“Raven, come in.”

Radio static, then a voice. “I’ve got you; are you in the lab? What happened?”

“Yeah we’re here. It’s destroyed, completely wiped. I don’t know what happened, it looks like someone went ham—”

A third voice, another man. “Monty, over here!”

The radio clicks. “Talk to me, guys.”

“It’s Murphy,” the first man says, footsteps as they both run over. “Raven, it’s bad.”

The radio is quiet. 

“Is he alive?”

“I think so, I think so, barely.”

“He’s not waking up.”

The radio flares. “We’re on our way; you know what to do.”

—

The floor of the lab is cold, his ears are ringing, and Murphy blinks slowly, his eyes barely focusing. There’s an unfamiliar face in front of his. 

“Don’t freak out, I know you don’t remember me; I’m Monty,” the guy says, then looks over his shoulder. “Hurry up; he’s awake.”

Another face pops into Murphy’s frame of vision. 

“Miss us, Murphy?”

He doesn’t know who they are, but he guesses, by the fact that they’re casually in the depths of Eligius and also aren’t killing him, that they’re Tomorrow People. The edges of Murphy’s vision are dark, the room seems to be moving in augmented reality, and his head is so, so heavy.

“Jasper, now is so not the time; are you ready?” Monty says.

Jasper (apparently) vanishes again, and there’s a rattling of glass and rustling of gloves. Murphy swallows, his throat completely try, and coughs. 

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Monty mutters, then raises his voice. “Jasper!” 

“Ready,” Jasper calls. “Just need Raven.”

Monty’s holding something on Murphy’s chest, Murphy feels the pressure but isn’t sure what it is, or why. He focuses, tries to steady his breathing, and looks down; it’s a cloth. 

Right, a cloth for the gaping chest wound. 

“The Suppressor?” he manages, his voice sounding weak. 

“Obliterated,” Monty says. “You did good, Murphy.”

Murphy nods, satisfied. 

He can’t feel his chest, which is really not good. The room isn’t getting any darker and it’s certainly not getting any clearer, and he hopes they’ll drag him out of Eligius so McCreary and Diyoza can’t use his corpse for anything.

The doors crash open, and there’s new footsteps, but Murphy can barely keep his eyes open. 

“Catch,” says a voice, the voice from the station, pi girl. Jasper had said he was waiting for Raven, so now he has a name.

Murphy sees a vial float over his vision, something thrown from the door of the lab over his head to Jasper’s direction. More footsteps, and the pi girl appears overhead. 

“You’re going to be fine, Murphy,” she says. “We got the antidote from Diyoza.”

“Incoming,” Jasper says.

“Hold this,” Monty directs Raven, and he moves so Jasper can kneel next to Murphy. Raven’s hands replace Monty’s on his chest, and Murphy sees that Monty’s hands come away red.

“Sorry about this,” Jasper says, and then a monstrous syringe inserts below Murphy’s ear.

“Damn,” Murphy whispers. “No horse needle?”

“You kid, but if I had one, I’d give it to you,” Jasper says, pulling the syringe out. “Sixty seconds, Rey, then he’s good.”

“Sixty seconds,” Raven repeats, looking down at Murphy. “Got it?”

He nods. Stay awake for a minute, and Diyoza can’t touch him. The injection feels...weird. Hot. He’s never been aware of his blood before, probably because he’s never had his body try to fight itself as it is right now. 

“Where’s your boyfriend?” he asks Raven.

“He’s not my—” she breaks off. “Whatever, Murphy. He’s turning off the psionic interceptor; we’re getting you out of here.”

“Cool,” Murphy says. His whole body might be boiling, or the shock might be wearing off, or the antidote might be killing him; he can’t really tell. 

“How much longer?” Monty asks, worriedly. 

“Forty seconds, for me,” Jasper says. “It’s up to Zeke to—”

“He’ll get it,” Raven snaps.

The lab is quiet. 

“Thirty-five,” Jasper chirps.

“You got Charlotte?” Murphy asks, because he’s not really interested in hearing Jasper count down to whether or not Diyoza can kill him. 

“We did,” Raven says, and she switches hands on his chest. “She’s in the lair; she’s fine.”

“And Emori?”

He doesn’t miss the look that Raven and Monty share.

“What about her?” Monty asks.

“Is she with you guys?” Murphy asks. 

“She is,” Raven says. “Nearly shanked me when I told her she couldn’t come with us tonight.” 

**_Guys we’re good._ **

It’s a voice, British, but it’s not on the coms. It’s in their minds, which means Zeke got the psionic **_Interceptor’s jammed._ **

“Told you,” Raven snips, and Jasper shrugs. 

A moment later, the air tenses, and then Zeke stumbles out of nowhere.

“Shit,” he says, when he sees Murphy, and the blood on Monty and Raven. 

“That bad, huh?” Murphy asks. 

“You’re fine,” Zeke says. “Rey, I’ve got maybe a minute, max, left on the breaker I left on the interceptor.

Raven looks up. “A minute?”

“That’s all I could do,” he says, apologetic. “Any more, I’d risk flagging something.” 

“Twenty seconds, Rey,” Jasper says.

Raven looks over at him. “Go.”

“But—”

“Go. Monty, you too.”

Jasper looks around the room, checks his watch and pauses. “Fifteen seconds. Then you’re home free.”

Raven nods. “Go.”

Monty and Jasper vanish.

Zeke is by Murphy’s side now; he and Raven share a look. 

“This is going to suck, Murphy,” Zeke says. 

“Yeah, I figured,” Murphy says. 

They pull him vertical, each supporting one of his arms, and by the time they get around to teleporting; he’s blacks out.

— 

They’re in a tornado. 

“I did it,” he yells, shouts into the swirling vortex. “I ended it and I want to come back. I’m sorry I left, I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

The wind rushes, whirling around him. Debris hurtles through the air, dirt and wind combining to shred his skin. 

“Emori,” he calls. “Where are you?”

The tornado is silent, and Murphy realizes she’s not in the rushing wind at all.

—

Murphy’s always known time is relative.

It’s different than space and sound and matter, all of which he can transcend, some way or another. Time is untouchable. He can’t warp it, regress it, own it, or influence it, all of which is paramountly clear as he waits for his body to decide if it wants to live or not. 

He wakes up. 

His skin is clammy, bathed in sweat so he shivers, and his chest aches. He opens his eyes. A tunnel, water dripping, low lights on stands in the corner of the room. He’s on a cot, nothing fancy, but he can hear the city above him.

The lair.

He can hear something else, feel it—a girl in a desert, running through the sand, chasing a glittery mirage, determined.

He looks over, and she’s there, dreaming.

Emori.

Slumped in a chair beside him, her feet propped up on the edge of his bed, her head resting on a hand. She has deep circles under her eyes; he wonders how long she’s been there.

**_Wake up._ **

Her eyes open, and she frowns, not sure why she’s woken. She looks up at the bed, on habit, and she sits up straight, pulling her legs off the bed, scooting the chair over.

“John,” she whispers. 

“Hi,” he says. His voice is rusty, and he frowns. 

“I’ll get some wa—”

“No,” he rushes, when she moves. She stops, looking back at him. “Stay?”

She smiles, a delicate thing. “Sure.”

His eyes flutter.

It feels surreal that it’s over, that he’s out. His whole body is aching, tired, but what a small price to pay. 

He looks back over at her, and she’s watching him carefully. He means to move his hand over to her, but when he tries, it twitches. She sees it though, and grabs it. 

“Thanks,” he says.

“Sure,” she says.

His body wants rest, but he can’t not yet. 

“I should’ve listened to you,” he tells her.

“You should have,” she says, soft.

“Sorry,” he says.

She squeezes his hand, and he knows she’s thinking ‘sure’. 

They stay silent for a moment, so much to say between them. 

“Do you really not remember me?” she asks.

Murphy wishes it were that simple. “I know I know you. I think...more than that.”

She looks down. “Raven said Diyoza pulled people out of your memory.”

He nods.

He doesn’t know what more to say. That he wouldn’t have remembered her if they weren’t more than they’re admitting right now. That she wouldn’t have appeared to him if she wasn’t everything, that every other face was a shadow, but he saw her, clear as day. That she knew him well enough in McCreary’s office. 

“Emori, I—”

“It’s okay,” she says. “There’s time for all of that later.”

He looks up at her, through heavy eyes. 

She smiles, reassuring, and leans closer to him. She rests her forehead against his, a simple gesture, just to be close. She hums something, a deep melody, the calmest lullaby. Murphy’s eyes flutter close, and he wonders what there’s left to dream of, when she’s right in front of him. 

**Author's Note:**

> hope you guys liked it ♥
> 
> Trope 1: Based off a TV show or movie (The Tomorrow People--same universe, some plot devices, premises, some characters (John=John, Astrid=Emori, Jedikiah=McCreary) but basically after the s1 finale)  
> Trope 2: Reunion (waking up to emori)  
> Trope 3: Kiss to keep cover/keep a secret (Emori kisses him and traces pi on his hand)   
> Trope 4: Forehead touches (when she rescues him)


End file.
